Last Skye post for a While

I've been busy at work lately, getting various jobs completed in preperation to my buggering off to England for a whole month. As such, I only managed to take one day off this week, but I made the most of it by teaming up with Neil once more in search of adventure exploring some derelict buildings and surrounding moorland. 

We met up near Kingsburgh, just four miles south of here, and set off through some cattle grazed hillside. Nothing too surprising to be found, though a very small Common Chickweed had me wondering if I'd finally found Lesser Chickweed. No such luck, firstly that typically grows on light sandy soils rather than on a huge chippings pile on open peatland, secondly it isn't known to occur on Skye. Other than that it looked fine...until I checked a plant book.

Common Chickweed Stellaria media. Which is not what I was hoping it would be!

I was pleasantly surprised to find a small patch of butterworts hiding in a damp hollow. They looked a little worse for wear, leaves inrolled almost in the fashion of Pale Buterwort. The overall green colour and larger size point to Common Butterwort though. 

A pretty tatty Common Butterwort Pinguicula vulgaris looking decidedly wet and miserable

A roadside shrub with deep red buds caught my eye. Neil said he'd noticed it before and it had flowers "like a rose" in the springtime. I looked again - it definitely wasn't a rose! But I didn't know what it was and the buds weren't ringing any bells for me. I took some pics, took a grid ref, took a small bit of branch and back indoors afterwards I hit The Field Key to Winter Twigs. Marvellous book, I only went wrong once this time (getting better!) My mystery plant was Flowering Currant Ribes sanguineum, a fairly local plant on Skye. I know of two Flowering Currants here in Uig, I shall have to see if I can find them in vegetative state, it would be too easy to wait until they're flowering. Hmmm, I'm not sure I'd agree the flowers are "like a rose", but then again maybe Neil has odd roses in his garden....

Flowering Currant Ribes sanguineum - buds may be greenish to purple or even multicoloured!

The lazy way to take a grid reference! 

I looked through the BSBI database afterwards, only to find that Stephen Bungard has already recorded this very plant back in May 2016. I think he must've been standing on the other side of the bush when he took his reading, he had it at NG 4010 5514. 

Kingsburgh House is a huge rambling building with several outbuildings/barns, all of which are in various states of disrepair/dereliction. The old lady who lived here passed away a couple of months ago, apparently she was a bit of a character but seeing as the place is now empty we felt it was safe to wander around and have an explore. It has to be said, the place needs more than a quick lick of paint to bring it up to habitable condition!

This is what happens when you don't prune your 'dwarf' Cotoneaster!

The old lady lived in the bungalow next to this big house. Apparently the taxi drivers used to put a plastic sheet on the back seat before letting her get in. Social services tried to offer help, she told them she didn't need it. It was quite difficult plant recording in what is effectively a private garden. Most shrubs were obviously planted, but the Ivy could be natural, as could the Snowdrops. In the end I recorded the Aspleniums on the walls and just one other plant. 

Maidenhair Spleenwort Asplenium trichomanes ssp quadrivalens

Black Spleenwort - Asplenium adiantum-nigrum

Wall-rue Asplenium ruta-muraria

Ground Elder Aegopodium podagraria - nobody would intentionally plant this in their garden

The Clan Macdonald have had the properties bequeathed to them. Their initial thoughts were that the bungalow could be salvaged and the rest is a liability. Be a crying shame to see it pulled down, maybe they'll (somehow) renovate?

We found quite a few nice non-plant things, lots of fungi and lichens (some of which we managed to ID) but as this is a plant blog I shall quickly move along. We came across a series of wet ditches which held aquatics. Bulbous Rush was in all of them, but so too was a clump of Glyceria. There are six species of Glyceria in Britain and at least two occur on Skye. I took some rubbish pics and grabbed a sample to check once back indoors. 

Glyceria sp. in a nutrient-enriched ditch

Back indoors I continued taking rubbish images.

All of the images are captioned with relevant features. Life would have been a lot easier had this grass been in flower, but it wasn't so I had to use vegetative features to differentiate between the various species on offer. No one book had a full suite of characters, I think I had SEVEN books on the go at one point whilst trying to nail this! In the end I was happy I had Small Sweet-grass Glyceria declinata. Happily, Stephen Bungard agreed - it was recorded in this tetrad by a competent botanist in 2005. 

We found a few patches of charophytes growing in a shallow section of river. Pulling up a small clump I took a tentative whiff - it smelled strongly of gone-off garlic, yuck! That alone was enough to tell me it was a Chara. Back indoors I keyed it to Chara vulgaris, which I think is the only Chara known from Skye, though charophytes on the whole are still rather under-recorded here. 

I ten found a second sample of charophyte, one that didn't stink of manky garlic. It quickly keyed through to Nitella. Using the key it ran very simply to Nitella flexilis var. flexilis, a new species for me! Really shoddy pics below

There are quite a few Nitella, but the only one that has a dactyl made up of just one cell and has well-developed branchlets that themselves fork is Nitella flexilis var. flexilis. Or so I thought! My copy of the BSBI Charophyte Handbook is dated 1986, nowadays things have changed! Stephen informed me he was going to record it as Nitella flexilis s.l. because Nitella opaca is essentialy identical, has been recorded from Rum, and you need fertile material to distinguish between the two. Fair play, I guess we need to go back and check later in the year. 

I finish work tomorrow and head off to Fife for an overnighter with Ali. Wednesday will be an utter tickfest of amazing plants and fungi (at least I hope it will...) and then I'm heading way down into The Badlands of Hampshire for what should prove to be a highly memorable stay with The Ghost. And then I'm best man at Danny The Pirate's wedding down in Cornwall. It seems almost certain that we will end up barred from a Napoleonic fort (ie the wedding venue). Not sure I've ever managed that before, so yeah, that should be a laff!